Recently, singer Arooj Aftablinkmadethe nation proud by winning the Grammy award. Another Pakistani has madethe global headlines for successfully winning the New York Timeslink’Invent a Word challenge.
Rohana Khattak is a sixteen-year-old girl from Islamabad. She participatedin the New York Times challenge.
What made her win?
Rohana Khattak submitted her coinage “oblivionaire” to the challenge. Theword, as explained by the girl, refers to a billionaire who chooses to beblind to the disparity and inequality that their wealth is creating. Thenew English world is a combination of “oblivious” and “billionaire”.
Rohana also gave an example to explain how oblivionaire can be used in asentence:
Gen Z’s furor over the so-called oblivionaires who ignore global crises isblowing up on social media, in a campaign being noticed by many global andpolitical figures.
Explaining why the word must be part of the English lexicon, she said:
We live in an era that has multiple global catastrophes taking placesimultaneously and inequality to the point that, while millions of childrenare starving to death, others have more money than they can spend. Thisegregious imbalance is not drawing enough attention. We need to have thevocabulary to name the people who, in the lap of luxury, detach themselvesfrom responsibility to the millions of people suffering and in agony aroundthe planet.
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Why does the word make sense?
Oxfam International stated:
The world’s ten richest men more than doubled their fortunes to $1.5trillion during the first two years of a pandemic that has seen the incomesof 99 percent of humanity fall and over 160 million more people forced intopoverty.
The fact describes how oblivionaire is a true concept and can become agenuine term.
Rohana Khattak has received immense praise across the country for herwin. PakistanAmbassadorlink to theUS, Sardar Masood Khan, also congratulated the teenager for her exceptionalfeat in the New York Times challenge.
